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Prehistoric Transylvanian mammal had blood-red teeth

By Jeff Hecht

SMALL, with oversized blood-red incisors, and down the road from Dracula’s lair to boot. To coincide with Halloween, we bring you Barbatodon transylvanicus, a 70-million-year-old mammal that scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs. The discovery of a new skull, complete with teeth, gives the first clues to its diet.

Barbatodon lived in what is now Transylvania, Romania, about 200 kilometres from the castle of the bloodthirsty medieval prince Vlad Dracula. It was roughly the size of a rat and belonged to a little-known group of mammals called multituberculates that outlived the dinosaurs, then died out 35 million years ago.

So what did the diminutive mammal eat? In the new fossil, its teeth look most like those of some modern-day shrews. That suggests it may have been partial to a meal of insects. Not so much bloodsucker, then, as insect crusher.